This is my most recent project. It's certainly not a pretty picture candidate as the usual colorful nebulae pictures that in the recent months have been published. (In German we'd say: "damit gewinnt man keinen Blumentopf" ) but maybe it still has some interesting aspects.

Today, I'm writing much more than usual because I think it's necessary to give some context and background to the image and also for myself. Maybe in a few months or years, I'll read this again and say: "what the hell made me write this!".

What we're seeing in this image is the Pegasus II galaxy cluster and from what I could find, there is (as of today) only one other image of this object here on AstroBin (just click the NGC 7499 label above the image, created through the astrometry process).

Before I'm starting with a thousand words of explanation: I find this an interesting object and maybe some viewers can or want to chime in and contribute with knowledge and/or ideas.

Now the thousand words (not really, I didn't actually count them):

How did it happen that I chose this object?
Well, I wanted to image something different. Something not commonly imaged. So, I let the computer crunch some numbers and look for a region in the sky with a rather high galaxy density. Besides the usual suspects like Stephan's Quintet or even Leo Triplet, the search found NGC7499 which is the large galaxy in the image's center. In the sense of finding something rare and populated with galaxies, I think I've been quite successful.

Now the famous question is: "can I and did I image this well?"
Please feel free to judge but it seems that we've got a not so easy target here. I've been using my modest 8in. SCT at native FL of 2000mm and binned my CMOS at 4x4 (9.3um effective pixel size) to have an image scale of about 1"pp in order to improve SNR as much as possible. Yet, even with the broad luminance filter and a gain of 12dB, I could easily expose a single sub for about 300 seconds with only the brightest stars saturating a bit. In short: it's a rather dark spot in the sky. Close by (south to the image) is star HD218717 which has magnitude 7,38 but it didn't fit into the FOV. In that case, I would have had a very saturated star. The brightest fellows in this picture start a mag 10.

Since it's pretty dark out there and objects are faint, I chose to start my personal "Deep Field" image (ok, comparing with Hubble is nonsense). Yet, it's my deepest (personal) view in space up to now. The total integration time in Luminance is about 11 hours over two nights (133 x 300s).

One issue that I've noticed is that there's a lot of gradient in the subs and also in the final image of course. The imaging sessions started with an object altitude at about 30deg. At transit, the altitude is close to 49deg. I'm just wondering if a skyglow reduction and light pollution filter may help to increase contrast? I'm certainly giving this idea a try some day.
And not to forget: it had to be new moon. Otherwise there would be absolutely no chance in capturing the faintest objects out there.

To add some color, I've let my DSLR capture a full night of data. As you may guess, the objects are extremely faint so there is not much point in trying to bring color into the faint galaxies. All I did is to color the brighter regions of the brighter galaxies and the stars. 

If it's not a pretty picture, what is it?
I don't know yet but my assumption is that it's a quite deep look into space with a very modest amateur equipment. So let's take a look!

Information out there (internet) seems to be quite sparse. Some initial research revealed that it's called the Pegasus II galaxy cluster, despite being located across the border in the constellation Pisces.
If you put "Pegasus II cluster" into a web search engine, you find more information about some computer clusters than about the galaxy cluster. Certainly, adding the keyword "galaxy" helps but then you're most often pointed at the Pegasus I Galaxy Cluster.
The most detailed information I could come up with is a publication by CHINCARINI and ROOD from 1976, where they've measured radial velocities of the galaxies in the I and II clusters.

As I couldn't find a lot published information, I though I should try some own analyses. Since we're talking about galaxies here, I've accessed the HyperLEDA database and let me give all galaxies and galaxy candidates in the FOV that it knows.

Because it's a "deeper" view into space, I was curious what the farthest galaxies are that I could image. Given the data from the HyperLEDA, I've created an annotation layer where the objects with known distances are colored according to the color scheme shown on the revision of the image. The values in the legend represent the object distances in mega parsecs (Mpc). Galaxies with unknown distance got a green color. The annotation layer was created with Wolfram Mathematica and is drawn on a flat image field. However, my telescope has some residual field curvature. Therefore, the annotation overlay is not a perfect fit to the actual image but one can still associate the objects with the annotation.

Interestingly, we can still see a few galaxies without annotation. I am wondering if they appear in another catalogue? Please, if you know more about them, let me and us know!

Back to what are the farthest galaxies that are visible in the image? Certainly, at some point it's difficult to distinguish a very far galaxy from a faint star. All galaxies annotated with a blue or cyan ellipse/circle are clearly identifiable as galaxies (or at least not stars). Once we get to the yellowish colors things get difficult and more so for the reddish markers.

My personal candidate for the farthest visible galaxy is the yellowish ring at the bottom of the image. If you compare with the image w/o annotation, one can see a faint signal. If it's really a galaxy (beyond my tech capabilities ...  yet), it's PGC4809448 with a distance of 2700Mpc or 8800Mly. Quite impressive for my toy scope, I would say. On a day with some high spirits, I'd be inclined to say that one can even see signal from PGC4836593 at 3500Mpc (11400Mly). It's the red ring above NGC7499.

So in summary, I'm very happy with the result. It allows a very deep look into our universe and that with only amateur equipment. 

Finally, if you made it until here, let me congratulate you for your endurance and pain resilience and thank you for reading it. I sincerely hope it wasn't too boring. Personally, I still have questions about the image (the unknown galaxies, if PGC4836593 is really the most distance visible galaxy in this image etc.) and maybe, for those who think they didn't suffer enough from my writing, someone wants to take a closer look at the data or discuss a few things, please feel free to do so.

As usual: feel free to comment!